How do you talk about God’s being?

We just started this series last week where we are exploring some of the attributes of God. These are descriptors about God that capture some of the truth about who God is. We’re obviously preaching from scripture to teach about God, but to structure our series, we’re using Westminster Q&A 4 which asks “What is God? Answer: God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”

Now, last week was the intro sermon. This week I’m going to be talking about the being of God… which, funnily enough, is not an attribute. God has a nature, an essence, a being. And really, the attributes that we talk about, are, to use imperfect image, us zooming in on the being of God, the nature of God, and saying, “here is something we can say about his being: he is wise, he is powerful, he is good” etc. But before you talk about the attributes, you really should stop and talk about God’s being in totality. That’s what theologians do: they first talk about God’s being, and then talk about his attributes.

So we’re going to talk about God’s being. Not maybe the easiest thing to talk about. How do you talk about the nature of God? Well, what’s amazing is that our God, who, as we will see soon, is beyond our comprehension, has made himself known to us. our God has said something about His Being. That in itself should astound us. And our responsibility, in light of the fact that God has said something to us, is to think thoughts worthy of God. You have a responsibility to think about who God is in a way that is worthy of him in light of what he has said.

Deut 29:29 The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.

So we’re going to be grounded in God’s word, because that’s the way to go. I can only talk to you confidently about the being of God as far as God’s word says something about it. And no further. So let us go to God’s word, seeking his help. We’ll be reading Acts 17:22… Paul, a Christian missionary, and author of many letters in the New Testament, arrives in the city of Athens, famed for being a center of culture and philosophy. And he comes to the cultural hub of the city, the Areopagus. Luke says “all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.” So they ask Paul, after they hear him preaching about Jesus and the resurrection, to address them. And here’s what Paul says:

Made for Awe

Studies have shown that when we experience awe, a number of things happen neurologically that are good for us. There is a network in your brain that is always thinking to yourself about yourself, called the DMN: Default Mode Network. Experiencing awe reduces activity in the DMN, resulting in someone thinking less in terms of what something means in relation to themself, and simply about the overall meaning of something. Awe makes someone feel “smaller”, part of something greater, and more oriented towards others.

Your vagus nerve carries signals between your brain and your heart, lungs and digestive system. Experiences of awe “strengthens the tone” of that nerve, leading to greater physical and psychological resilience.

A state of awe even appears to decrease the production of inflammatory proteins linked with chronic disease and depression.

Whether it’s witnessing the vastness of nature, hearing a great piece of music, or even intellectually grasping an incredible concept, God made our bodies to function best when we’re in awe.

All this to say, it’s good to have your mind blown, and I hope that as we consider God’s word and think about the being of God, it’s God that blows your mind. We were made for awe. To experience awe. And nothing should blow our minds, lead us to experience awe, than thinking about our awesome God.

Really, Paul in a sense is trying to blow the Athenians minds. He’s trying to in many ways blow up the concept they had of God and provide them with a more biblical understanding of the being of God.From this passage we’re going to draw out three things about the being of God. As I mentioned, God’s being isn’t really an attribute of God. God has a being, or we might interchangeably say “nature” or “essence.” And really we’ll be talking about 3 different attributes that pertain to God’s being or essence, sometimes called “essential” attributes.

• God’s all-sufficiency
• God’s incomprehensibility
• God’s simplicity

And what I hope I hope you take away from today as we mine these truths from God’s word, is that Because God is entirely unlike us, it should astound us that he draws near to us. And we’ll see with these 3 points, 3 ways that our text shows us that God is unlike us, but for each way God is unlike us, our text indicates a way that God nevertheless draws near to us. So 3 ways he is unlike us, and 3 ways that God draws near to us.

God’s all-sufficiency

Here’s the first truth we learn about God’s being that shows us he’s entirely unlike us. God is entirely self-sufficient and all-sufficient.

Verse 25: he is not served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.

God, in his very being, is not a God who stands in need of anything. He is self-sufficient. God doesn’t lack anything. This pagan concept, that the gods actually received food, actually were nourished by sacrifices, was not the concept behind OT Jewish sacrifice.

In fact, we’re specifically shown this in Psalm 50. There God is rebuking his people, and he says “Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you” – not for lack of sacrifices that he’s rebuking them.

But it’s for this idea that God needs their sacrifices. He says, “every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills… If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine. 13 Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?” (50:8, 10-13). Later in this Psalm he boils down the issue with this kind of thinking. The issue with this kind of thinking is that we are committing idolatry by making God in our own image. He says, “you thought that I was one like yourself” (v21).

That’s always what we’re tempted to do. Make God like ourselves. But God is not. He’s perfect. His being is not such that he needs sacrifices.

Frame it for us: Many of you have heard that the chief end, purpose of man is “to glorify and enjoy God forever.” True. But not in a way that we are actually giving something to God that he doesn’t have. Glorifying God does not add something to him. It’s our chief end. We’re designed to glorify God. Praising God orients us appropriately to him. He deserves it. But he doesn’t lack glory.

He doesn’t lack anything. He is self-sufficient, but more than that, He is all-sufficient. I mentioned another word for God’s self-sufficiency is his aseity. That means “from himself”ness. It doesn’t just say that God doesn’t need something. What it says about God’s being is that God has all life in himself. He has perfect fullness, he is so rich in his own being that he is perfectly content in himself. If there were no world, no universe, God would still be a perfectly happy, full God.

He is unlike us in this way. We are dependent beings. We need things to survive, even things far lower than us in their essential worth. We, made in God’s image, need water, oxygen. We need other people, relationship. We are not self-sufficient. And we’re certainly not all-sufficient for everyone or anyone else around us.

But though God is entirely unlike us in his being, he nevertheless draws near to us. V25 God “gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.” V28 “In him we live and move and have our being” – Paul repurposing a pagan poet’s line to say, “God, being entirely sufficient in himself, not needing us, allows us to enjoy his fullness: in him we live, in him we move, in him we have our being. Our being is given from the one who is ultimate being.

Think about this: God, in his fullness, delighted to bring everything into being. This world is a gift. It’s from God. We might think God being self-sufficient means he’d be a lonely, distant God. Because self-sufficient people often try to live on their own, independent of people. But God, who truly does not need us, out of his sheer delight, creates, gives us life, and makes us, and makes us for the most profound fellowship with himself. It’s all a gift.

God’s Incomprehensibility

The 2^nd thing we want to say about God’s being is that it is incomprehensible.

Paul begins his speech by pointing to an altar he found in the city of Athens “to an unknown god.” The Athenians were so religious that they wanted to cover all their bases. Just in case there was a god they didn’t know about, they wanted to make sure that he still got some offerings. So they made an altar to an unknown God. (People think they actually found one of these in Rome)

Well, Paul says, “Let me tell you about this God you don’t know. Let me make him known to you.” Now, funnily enough, if you noticed, one of the prominent things Paul goes on to do is to tell the Athenians what God is not like.

Verse 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, 25 nor is he served by human hands… 29 we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone.

One of the chief ways we can talk about the being of God is by saying what it is not. What is God in his being? Well he isn’t the kind of being that lives in manmade structures. He is not the kind of being who needs the things humans give to gods. His being is not like gold or silver or stone.

This way of talking about God is called “the way of negation.” We often cannot positively state things about God. Instead we say a lot about God by saying what he is not. He is not finite – he is infinite. He does not change. He is unchanging (immutable).

And the reason Paul speaks about God in these terms points to the fact that God, in his being, is incomprehensible to us as humans (which is itself a term of negation).

What does that mean? You might think that I’m saying, “Paul just said he’s making God known to these people, and now you’re telling me that God’s being is unknowable.” No. Don’t worry, I’m not saying that we only know that we cannot know God. That’s agnosticism. But God is incomprehensible. When you comprehend something, you don’t have a basic grasp of something. You have an extensive, holistic grasp of something.

So if I have a problem with my Heating and A/C unit, and I tell you, you might say, “You should talk to Joe over there. He’s an HVAC guy. He has a comprehensive knowledge of furnaces.” That’s great! He doesn’t just know that you can turn them on and off, and that furnaces give you heat and A/C cools your air, and it costs a lot to repair them – that’s where my knowledge ends. I don’t have comprehensive knowledge of this stuff.

Now, what I know about furnaces, is true. It’s real knowledge. But it’s not Joe’s knowledge.

Now, when it comes to God’s being, we cannot comprehend it. We cannot fathom the depths of the being of God. We can have true knowledge of God. But at every point as we talk about God, we speak truly but incompletely.

As finite creatures, we have limits in our talking about God. Limits to our minds capacities. Even if we weren’t fallen and sinful we’d have limits. God is beyond us. He is incomprehensible to us.

This is the uniform testimony of scripture.

Job 11:7-9

7 Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty? 8 It is higher than heaven—what can you do? Deeper than Sheol—what can you know? 9 Its measure is longer than the earth and broader than the sea.

Ps 145:3 Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable.

It’s specifically true when we consider the essence, or being of God. Moses at one point asks God, “Please show me your glory.” 19 And [God] said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The Lord.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. 20 But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.”

Now, what’s God talking about when he talks about his face. God is a spirit. He doesn’t have a face. Faces reveal people in an innate way. Can you imagine feeling like you knew your spouse or your best friend if you never saw their face? If they didn’t have one? Faces reveal our inner being. God says, “You cannot look on my inner being. You cannot gaze upon the divine essence. No man can.

Now let’s dig deeper into God’s incomprehensibility. Let’s see how deep God’s incomprehensibility is.

What requires greater depths of understanding: the works of God, or God himself? God himself.

Okay, but what is our grasp of just God’s works? There’s a finite amount of knowledge that it would take to comprehend God’s creation. Even if we just think about this from a scientific perspective, how much of the different branches of sciences can you hold in your head? Astronomy, Astro-physics, biology, chemistry, bio-chemistry, neuroscience, geology. How much of those sciences can you grasp? How about mathematics? Some days basic addition is too much for me.

There’s a staggering amount of information in this world. We’re not even getting to understanding the geography of this world, having a perfect grasp of God’s work in the historical rise and fall of nations and empires. Knowing all the events going on in this world right now. Knowing just every name of every person.

You keep zooming out, you realize, you don’t have a clue about anything in this world.

Eccles 3:11 God “has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” We have some grasp of eternity, we know ourselves, that we are made for more than this life… but we cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

And God is greater.

Now here is something that might blow your mind. God comprehends himself. That’s how great God’s mind is. He has a full knowledge of himself. You don’t have a full knowledge of your own being. What does it mean to be a human being. Do you know a fraction of the biochemical processes that it takes for you to function? No. We’re practically incomprehensible to ourselves.

But not God. He’s incomprehensible. Only God comprehends God. He is entirely unlike us. Because he is incomprehensible to us.

But Acts 17 shows us, though he is incomprehensible, God draws near to us. He is incomprehensible, but He wants us to know him. He has given us his word. He has sent men to preach that word. Paul makes him known in a simple speech. Though he is beyond us, Paul says, “he is actually not far from each one of us.” And that’s true in a special sense to you who have had a copy of his word. God calls us to know him. “Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord”

God’s Simplicity

Here’s last way he is unlike us. This is tangentially arrived at in this passage, but I want to draw it out. God is simple.

You might be thinking I’m insulting your intelligence now: “You just told me God is incomprehensible, now you’re finishing by telling me he’s simple?” I don’t mean he’s easy to grasp. I don’t mean he’s simple like a simple machine is basic. Simplicity in theology refers to the idea that God is not composed of parts.

Paul says “the divine being is [not] like gold or silver or stone.” Now, there are a lot of ways that God is not like these things. One of the things we can say is that God is spiritual, not material. God is a spirit. He isn’t made of matter. Material language used to describe God in scripture is used to accommodate truth about God to us. He is spirit. John 4:24.

But what I want to get at is that at the most basic level, the thing about gold or silver or stone is that you can break it into parts. It’s composed of parts, down to the atomic, sub-atomic level.

God is not. He is simple. It’s actually helpful to think about this before we focus on the rest of these attributes. When we’re talking about God, because we’re finite creatures who have to talk about things sequentially, we first talk about God’s being, then about different attributes. But God isn’t composed of a layer of primeval, raw being, topped with layers of attributes. That’s not accurate. It’s not accurate because God is simple. He has no parts.

Maybe the best way to explain this by contrast. You and I are complex by nature. Humans are by nature part spiritual, part material. We are complex. You can’t take away the human body and still have a human being. A human being is body and soul.

Everything that is created has parts. And if you think about it, really, it is the presence of different parts in something, that often points to design. The more parts you find in something, the more clear it is that something is made.

Think about it from the perspective of human designs. If you look at a brick wall, you see lots of parts. And they’re assembled, and ordered. And you recognize a designer because you see the parts made into a whole.

You don’t have that with God. You can’t zoom out and take in God’s being and see the parts that make him up. You cannot zoom in and see mortar holding together the attributes of God. There is just God. He has no designer. And there is no part of God that is more basic or essential than God.

Now, you might say, “Josh, there is no verse that says that God is simple in the Bible.” True. But theologically, God’s simplicity is the glue that holds a lot together about who God is.

If God were not simple, we could not say that God is unchanging. If the being of God were not simple, if it was capable of increasing or diminishing, if there; if there were metaphysical cracks in his being, there is the possibility that God could change. But we’re told that God is faithfulness. God always keeps his promises. He can only do that if he is unchanging. He is unchanging because he is a perfect being incapable of becoming less perfect (or more perfect), incapable of division or separation.

Here’s another thing about God’s simplicity. Without divine simplicity, we cannot say “God is Love.” We can say God has love. We can say that there is love in God. But we cannot say God is love. We cannot take a single attribute and describe God in his totality as that one attribute, unless God is not composed of parts. God is love all the way down. That won’t change. That won’t become untrue. Because God isn’t the right mix of attributes. 12% love, 8% goodness, 9% faithfulness… that’s not God. God is love. God is holy holy holy.

And what’s even better, we never have to wonder if what we see about God isn’t the whole picture of who God is. We don’t know God exhaustively, comprehensively. But again, we do know God truly. And we know All of God truly but not exhaustively.

1 Corinthians 13:12 says, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully.” When we see God one day, we’ll know him far more fully, and his character will be the same character that we’ve known in part here. God isn’t hiding the fact that he’s actually really mean from us. Or that there are actually 4 persons who share the divine essence, or 5, instead of three. God is simple, and so there won’t be a heavenly surprise where we find out there’s actually a side of God that is very different from what he’s revealed. It will be the same God we’ve known, but it will just be a much fuller knowledge of that same God.

God’s simplicity doesn’t make him flat or boring. It actually astounds us and makes us sense when we consider this God that we are considering a being that ought to make us tremble and stand in awe of him. He is not like us. He is unassailable.

There’s a science fiction book called The Dark Forest. It’s a great book, part of a great trilogy. The book’s plot involves humans preparing for an alien invasion of our solar system over the span of multiple centuries.

When the alien fleet is close to arriving, Humanity believes that we are far beyond the capabilities of this alien civilization. Then, the aliens send a single probe ahead of their main invasion fleet. And it stops at a certain point at the edges of our solar system. And the human space fleet fly out to meet this probe. They secure it with a great claw and bring it into a ship’s hanger. They send a team to investigate this probe. It looks like a water droplet with a mirror surface. Entirely smooth. It looks fragile.

So they examine the surface with a microscope to see what this thing is made of. They examine it at 100x magnification: nothing changes. They see a smooth mirror. So they zoom in to 1000x magnification. Nothing changes. A smooth mirror.

So they increase the magnification on the droplet by a factor of 10: 10,000 x magnified. It’s a smooth mirror. Adjust to 100,000x – no change. 1 million x – no change. 10 million x – no change.

At a macromolecular level, the droplet has no cracks, no discernable parts. It’s surface is simple. And with horror it slowly dawns on them: this probe isn’t fragile. It’s stronger than any material humanity has ever seen. It’s simplicity tells them that this thing is unbreakable. And it terrifies them. They realize their own power is not in the same league as this civilization.

God’s simplicity reminds us: he’s not in the same league as us. He’s not like us, but scaled up a billion times, and totally good. He’s untouchable. He’s not like gold or silver or stone. He’s not like you. He’s not like me.

But Paul hints at something astounding about the most simple God. He says in v31 “he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed.” Paul is hinting at the mystery of the incarnation: God judges the world, but he’s judging the world by a man whom he has appointed. What? The God who is not like gold or silver or stone? The unbreakable God has drawn near to us through a mere man?

The God who is not like you or me became like you and me! The 2^nd person, God the Son, who fully shares in the divine nature —who is most simple, without parts— took to himself a human nature, which is the opposite of divine nature: it is not essentially simple, but complex.

According to his divine nature, Christ, our savior, is and remains simple. The divine nature is unchanged by the incarnation. But the mind-blowing thing about the incarnation is that God pulls off the unthinkable. The Son takes to himself a human nature. The Son, unbreakable, most simple in his divine nature, unites with the dust of human flesh, and the Son exposes himself to pain, his hands to piercing nails, his head to 3-inch thorns, so that God might absorb the penalty for our sin.

Do you understand why we glory in the cross, why we make so much of the blood of Christ? Because the very fact that God could take on flesh and blood and die defies all notions of God. We tend to think today “Well of course Jesus is man, but is he really God?” In the early church, it was the opposite: “Well of course Jesus is God, but is he really man? Would God do that? Could God do that?”

Yes. He’s judging the world by a man, who he has raised from the dead. And this man is God. The most simple God has taken on flesh! What a God!

He is so unlike us. He has all fullness in himself, and we are empty. He is comprehensible only to himself, and we are full of ignorance. He is perfectly powerful in his simplicity, and we are weak, sinful and broken creatures.x

But he draws near to us. In his sufficiency he gives us life, he imparts saving knowledge of himself to us, and in the Son he has united himself to us. The dust of the earth sits on the throne of heaven, and we will be with him one day. With God. This God. What an awesome God!